Thursday, October 20, 2011

Fledging author James Erwin sold Warner Bros. on movie rights to his short story posted on Reddit. But the user agreement for the news community website could raise some thorny intellectual property questions.

In the annals of Hollywood, there have been many tales of writers realizing their dreams by successfully pitching a studio on a film. But these days, with many studios getting sued left and right for allegedly ripping off ideas from writers, executives have become a lot more careful about unsolicited submissions.

Top-ranking Obama administration officials, including the U.S. copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails.

The e-mails, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, (.pdf) show the administration’s cozy relationship with Hollywood and the music industry’s lobbying arms and its early support for the copyright-violation crackdown system publicly announced in July.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Piracy might be a filmmaker’s best friend. Or at least not the worst enemy.

Despite the conventional wisdom that BitTorrent websites and illegal downloading are destroying the fabric of entertainment industries, a number of advocates and activists believe that piracy can help independent filmmakers as both a distribution mechanism and promotional tool.

Revenue generation may be another matter, but as “Ink” producer Kiowa Winans says, “The torrent community spread the film everywhere and helped build an audience more effectively than any decent-budget ad campaign could have.”

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Viacom and Google, who have been tangling over copyright violations at YouTube since 2007, will be at it again today at a federal courthouse in New York. The two sides will start oral arguments for Viacom’s appeal of the case, which Google won decisively in a 2010 ruling.

In the past both sides have tried digging up evidence to discredit each others’ argument, and while both came up with plenty of embarrassing stuff, they couldn’t find a smoking gun.